A researcher is interested in examining the status of domestic violence victims after counseling. To carry out this study, she p
lans to recruit a sample of domestic violence victims from the local shelter and follow them for 6 months to see if they leave their violent partner. She plans to select a comparison group of women outpatients from the local community mental health center presenting with depression who have admitted to assaults from their partners. The overall hypothesis is that the shelter's counseling staff and ongoing support group will do more to help domestic violence victims leave dangerous environments than therapists focusing solely on depression and not supplementing with an ongoing group experience. In this study, what is the most apparent dependent variable?
The answer is: living arrangement with/without violent partner
Dependent variable is the type of variable which values depended on its interaction with independent variable.
To put it simply, dependent variable is something that you measure (or try to influence) during an experiment.
From the case above, the research tried different method of treatments and see which one would influence the subject the most and decide to leave their violent partner. From this alone we can say that the women's living arrangement is something that the researcher want to measure.
